1. Leonid Iovich Gaidai was a Soviet comedy film director, screenwriter and actor who enjoyed immense popularity and broad public recognition in the former Soviet Union.
21 Facts About Leonid Gaidai
1. 2.
Leonid Gaidai's films broke theatre attendance records and were some of the top-selling DVDs in Russia.
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Leonid Gaidai has been described as "the king of Soviet comedy".
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Leonid Gaidai's mother Maria Ivanovna Lubimova was born in the Ryazan Oblast to Russian parents.
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Leonid Gaidai met her love through her brother Egor, a katorga worker who sent her a photo of his friend along with a marriage proposal.
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Leonid Gaidai's elder brother Aleksandr was a well-known poet and a war correspondent.
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Leonid Gaidai took part in amateur dramatics from a young age.
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Leonid Gaidai first served in Mongolia, then finished sergeant courses, becoming a squad leader.
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On 20 December 1942, Leonid Gaidai was awarded the Medal "For Battle Merit" for killing three Nazi soldiers and taking hostages during the battle for Yenkino village.
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Leonid Gaidai studied at the Irkutsk District Drama Theatre's studio school, and after graduating in 1947 acted in theatre productions.
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Leonid Gaidai subsequently attended the Moscow Institute of Cinematography, Grigori Aleksandrov workshop, completing his studies in 1955.
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Leonid Gaidai married the actress Nina Grebeshkova, who played minor roles in his future films.
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Leonid Gaidai initially worked as an assistant to director Boris Barnet on the 1955 film Lyana, before directing the first of his own films in 1956.
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Between 1961 and 1975, Leonid Gaidai directed a number of top-selling films, each one a huge financial success and becoming wildly popular in the Soviet Union.
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Leonid Gaidai filmed a play by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future, Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs, Nikolai Gogol's Incognito from St Petersburg, and Borrowing Matchsticks, a story by the Finnish author Maiju Lassila.
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Leonid Gaidai's top-grossing film The Diamond Arm sold 76.7 million tickets in the Soviet Union alone, becoming the third highest-grossing Soviet film.
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Leonid Gaidai has a cameo in the final one, There's Good Weather in Deribasovskaya, where he plays an old gambler who tries to beat the one-armed bandit.
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Leonid Gaidai was made a People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1974, People's Artist of the USSR in 1989, and died in Moscow on 19 November 1993.
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Leonid Gaidai's comedies have a very visual style of comedy, utilizing slapstick and physical humor, with dialogue that has been described as "pithy, aphoristic, or nonsensical".
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Leonid Gaidai was a master of fast-paced comedy, his style and rhythm somewhat similar to Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
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Leonid Gaidai remains most famous for the outstanding string of comedies he directed between 1961 and 1975, when nine of the ten films he made became Russian classics, selling between 20 and 76 million film tickets each, and becoming box office champions for several years in a row.